Saturday, January 26, 2008

Winner announced! The actual number of Maximilian Sunflower seeds...

Then I went to a farm auction. It was a cold, sleeting morning and when I got home I was too cold to do anything more ambitious than count those seeds.

Here I am, caught by Zed in the process of counting.

Here are the counted seeds, in piles of 10. (Lower right is a pile of chaff.)

Those are awfully small piles. Deceptively small...

... and therefore the actual number of seeds, I was amazed to discover, was: 293. MORE than advertised!

How could I have been so wrong? I certainly would never win a jellybean counting contest.

Speaking of which, if you think you're good at this kind of thing, you can Monday-morning quarterback at the 10 cent designer flicker page where this picture appeared. The contest is long over, but all the guesses (many) are still posted, along with the answer.

James Surowiecki posits, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, that "under the right circumstances, collective intelligence (The Wisdom of Crowds) is greater than the individual intelligence, no matter how brilliant or informed the individual is."

So now, if you have a lot of time on your hands or are procrastinating at a very high level, you can go back and average all the answers given in the previous contest and see if Surowiecki's hypothesis is worth beans (bupkis, which I always thought meant beans but actually - according to Wikipedia - is a Yiddish word from Slavic roots, kozebupkes, meaning 'goat droppings').

5 Comments:

Melinama, I tried out your raisin nut coffeecake yesteday. It is delicious! My 5-year old especially loved it because their were many ingredients for him to pour in. However, I didn't realize until I took a bite that you probably meant ground cloves... oops... well, my family understands that I always do something to goof up a recipe, and they all loved it. Thanks for sharing it!

"Every day above ground is a good day."
I'm an eccentric musician living in the woods with Hector and Jethro the donkeys, a bunch of chickens, and my son Ezra. I have a a world music klezmer cabaret band
Mappamundi and a related project in Yiddish theater music. Please visit us at Triangle area
wedding ensembles. Find me on Google+! I often wonder if I was supposed to have lived some different life. I live in the woods and study Spanish, Yiddish, and painting.